When Peter Doherty speaks – and writes – you need to sit up and take notice. He didn’t win the  Nobel Prize for nothing. He’s even written a book about how to win such a global award! He is also the author of  “A Light History of Hot Air” which was a very impressive comprehensive study  – with a light  touch – into internationally important topics like climate change and the excesses of fossil fuel and greenhouse gases. Now the chickens have come home to roost! This time in “Sentinel Chickens”, he is away with the birds, but for a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in a coalmine, a saying Doherty later deconstructs, birds, even chickens, act as monitors, beautiful and endlessly fascinating creatures that, as in ancient mythology, act as harbingers of danger – in relation to outbreaks of diseases and even in relation to climate change and environmental degradation. While I have read the book myself and highly recommend it, I decided to share a review from the Sydney Morning Herald that says it all. Read More

Avian allies

Sydney Morning Herald (25 August 2012):

WHEN a deadly outbreak of avian influenza (H5N1) in Hong Kong hit the headlines in 1997, the less scientifically minded among us were caught off guard. We had questions. Our imaginations ran wild. You mean chickens get flu? Who’s heard of a chook sneezing? Do you catch this virus through eating roast chicken, living near a poultry farm or feeding crusts to seagulls? Is my beloved pet budgerigar an assassin, and how about the backyard magpies?

These are just a few of the questions Peter Doherty delicately teases out in his survey of the way birds, or at least the scientific study of them, have led to massive advances in the understanding of infectious and other human diseases.

Because chooks might occasionally carry lethal viruses, as in the case of H5N1, but they also have the capacity to save lives, particularly when they’re placed in cages and plonked in strategic positions around the countryside to gauge, say, the spread of Murray Valley encephalitis. Or when their eggs are used by scientists to study how viruses reproduce or for the production of influenza vaccines. Or when 4000 or more wattlebirds and gulls fall from the sky, poisoned by lead, as they did in Esperance in 2007, and authorities are able to track its source before humans and children begin to die, too.

As Doherty says, ”our free-flying, wide-ranging avian relatives serve as sentinels, sampling the health of the air, seas, forest and grasslands that we share with them and with the other complex life forms on this planet”.

Like the proverbial canary in a coalmine, a saying he later deconstructs, they act as monitors, beautiful and endlessly fascinating creatures that, as in ancient mythology, act as harbingers of danger – particularly in relation to climate change and environmental degradation.

Doherty, a Nobel prize winner, is as much a teacher as a research scientist – he could tell you the answer to questions straight up, but instead, so you’ll piece things together, he foregrounds his discussions in basic explanations of biology, anatomy and pathology.

Despite his admission early on that ”we working scientists increasingly find ourselves working in a kind of Tower of Babel, where it’s harder and harder to stay abreast of what’s going on in even closely related fields”, his writing spans an impressive array of disciplines, from ornithology and microbiology to avian pathology and psychology, zoology, phenology and poetry. Along the way we meet a fascinating array of people – research scientists, Nobel prize winners, eccentric but dedicated blokes ”who spent a good part of their lives sticking probes up the back ends of birds across the planet” – many of whom Doherty counts as close friends.

In the process, we come to understand the endless jigsaw that is scientific research. There are seemingly obscure research findings such as Peyton Rous’ 1911 experiment with a chicken cancer virus that years later, picked up and developed by other researchers, led to groundbreaking work in human cancer research. There are detective stories that span countries, cultures and continents, and case studies that link vultures with gout to sacred cows, Hindu tradition and an anti-inflammatory known as Diclofenac. Whodunits that tie red knot sandpipers to crab eggs, whelk harvesting and the Caribbean queen conch.

Doherty flits from fossils to migration patterns, from wingspan measurements to white blood cell studies of horseshoe crabs, but the analyses he reaches are simple and precise: ”The basic message is that any sudden, human-induced change has consequences when it comes to natural ecosystems, which is just one of the many reasons why widespread ignorance of science and the resultant failure to grapple with reality are dangerous.”

It is, in its own way, a brief history of disease, although, as Doherty notes, ”it says something profound about the human condition that history takes much greater account of wars and military mayhem than of the enormous losses caused by communicable disease”. And brief namely because ”as recently as the 19th century, people made no connection between infestation with visible parasites like worms and ticks and the unseen world of infection with microbes”. Before then, the likes of Shelley and Keats, who wrote about birds with such aplomb, feared death from ”miasmas” (dangerous fogs from marshlands) rather than their feathered friends.

Yet Doherty’s greatest revelation is his discovery that a love of birds ”is one of the few things that can transform those who have no formal training in science into enthusiastic practitioners of science”.

We have a lot to learn from birds, and Doherty’s book entices us to start.

Peter Doherty was a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Bryon Bay Writers Festival.
Source: www.smh.com.au